


It's Addictive the Minute You Let Yourself Think

by royal_chandler



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Age Difference, Alternate Universe - Coffee Shops & Cafés, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Inappropriate Humor, So Many Ship Tags
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-12
Updated: 2016-01-12
Packaged: 2018-05-13 09:00:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,208
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5702668
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/royal_chandler/pseuds/royal_chandler
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The barista mishears his name as Ren and then his grande Americano is picked up by a student named Rey, who actually has a face that is just like staring into the sun. Ben can nearly <em>feel</em> himself being tossed around by fate because when they correct coffees, her pumpkin spiced latte for his Americano, he sees the model for a Falcon jet in her textbook.</p>
            </blockquote>





	It's Addictive the Minute You Let Yourself Think

**Author's Note:**

> Title is a line from Sara Bareilles' "You Matter to Me."
> 
> This fic was supposed to be 500 words of getting a coffee AU out of my system. Look how well I did.

*

 

Although Starbucks—far too cluttered with the town’s campus population—is never Ben’s first choice, it has proximity working for it as an advantage so on a day when his office is particularly suffocating but he can’t afford to be more than five blocks away, he goes.

The barista mishears his name as Ren and then his grande Americano is picked up by a student named Rey, who actually has a face that is just like staring into the sun. Ben can nearly _feel_ himself being tossed around by fate because when they correct coffees, her pumpkin spiced latte for his Americano, he sees the model for a Falcon jet in her textbook.

“My father was a pilot,” he explains after the name of the plane has left his mouth without permission and he’s unconsciously traced the black ink of the engine in Diagram 44-B with a finger and the weight of a ghost at his back.

Rey offers him the seat opposite of her and no is on the tip of his tongue because he has a meeting to prep for, she’s ten years his junior and he doubts that they have anything to talk about but she’s been _working on this thesis for the past three hours and could use the distraction, not to mention the place is packed, you’re not going to get a better offer._

He stays.

Distraction or not, he learns a few of the finer points of aeroelasticity in relation to fluid mechanics. He learns that she’s paying off part of tuition by working in an auto body shop and that she has designs on getting a pilot’s license as soon as she can afford the time. Her passion is unfiltered and near intoxicating and Ben has no trouble picturing her in the sky, skimming a horizon and well out of reach.

She asks after what he does and he tells her about the corporate law firm he works for. The ins and outs of it sound so depressingly clinical that he could cringe but she nods and listens, inserts genuine and thoughtful questions that provoke the more interesting details and it’s too easy talking to her.

Before Ben knows it, his lunch hour is over and he’s having to walk away. He’s caught off-guard by his reluctance, how compromised her little wave goodbye leaves him.

 

*

 

The next time Ben’s there, so is she.

Rey calls him over to her table in a tone people usually save for friends and asks after the project he’d told her about the last time they had talked. They exchange progress reports and she invites him to come back after he orders. There’s a burgeoning—not entirely rational—want to please her that hums inside of him so he agrees once again.

They discuss more than just their day jobs and her school assignments this time around, cover topics in the media, news, and pop culture. She doesn’t edit herself at all, she’s blunt about her beliefs and meets every challenge with more arsenal than he expects. They don’t strike common ground too often but their contestations don’t derail Ben from wanting to engage with her more.

Instead he welcomes it and looks forward to it week after week.

 

*

 

“I wasn’t expecting to see you,” Ben says three days before Christmas, spotting her in the corner of the coffeehouse.

Rey’s face turns up from the blue light of her computer and her crinkle-eyed— _happy_ —smile causes the inside of his chest to squeeze, sudden and sharp.

“Hey, you. Hux being an unimaginable asshole still?”

Swallowing over this new affection has his voice near hoarse. “Is he ever not?”

“Well if your new Starbucks attendance record is any indication.”

Rey kicks out the free chair and he drops into it with the familiarity of a habit after shrugging out of his rain soaked jacket.

“They don’t believe in breaks at your school?” He nods to her computer and the couple of books she has stacked next to it, her highlighted notes. “I figured you’d be home by now.”

Ben had thought about it more times than he’s comfortable with. He imagined her far away in England, somewhere with probably just as much rain but managing to stay warm and stress-free, relieved at not having to deal with the weird stranger who keeps happening into her weekly study sessions and caffeine fix.

“Home’s here for me,” Rey says simply enough but it’s somehow gotten to the point where he can read her, clear like the lines of one’s reflection in a mirror.

“I’m sorry,” Ben says awkwardly, honestly—with a bit of stupidly selfish guilt. “I shouldn’t have presumed—”

She brushes it off, worries through her papers with her mouth set in a fake smile. “No, it’s okay. I mean, it’s normal, yeah? For people to have parents, to know where they come from. Me, I was left at a group home when I was five and I haven’t the slightest as to why. God,” she sighs, heavily and frustrated, bending over the notes in her hands with chipped, crimson painted thumbs. “I didn’t mean to—shit. I’m talking a lot. Now I’m sorry. Can we please pretend that I’m not a blabbering idiot?”

The lively murmur of the fellow patrons and the gurgling of the machines fill the next moments.

Ben takes the abrupt scrape of a chair leg a couple yards away for a cue. “When I was sixteen, I got drunk behind the wheel and my father jumped in the passenger seat to stop me.” His eyes don’t leave her face and she doesn’t scare at all. “I ended up wrapping my car around a tree and killing him. My mother, she calls a lot around this time of year and I’ve ignored four voicemails so far today.”

“Oh—Christ.”

“Yeah.”

She considers him, a drawn out ellipsis with her head cocked and eyes narrowed and shadowy. Her shoe nudges his under the table. “What was the moral of that? To warn me against getting into cars with you?”

He lets out the breath he didn’t know he was harboring. “To make you feel better about the fact that you haven’t wrapped your non-existent parents around any trees.”

The dusting of freckles on her scrunched nose is disarming. “That’s a little fucked. You have reprehensible humor. I should know. My friends say so all the time about me. I’m fixing it at a snail’s pace.”

“Well at least you’re trying,” he returns dryly.

She barks out a laugh, lovely and loud, turning a couple of heads, and Ben can barely stand the echoes between his fingers.

 

*

 

One day, Ben confesses to her that he ultimately wants to leave Snoke’s firm. He wants to start his own—be on the other end of all the property acquisitions and mergers, to help people if he can—and he’s only still with Snoke to build up the necessary experience to do so.

He could get addicted to the pride that brightens her face, having it directed his way.

 

*

 

Ben has no excuse this time, not that he has since the first. Traffic’s fine and he has no pressing paperwork or conference calls. There’s a perfectly good tomato and brie sandwich in the break room’s refrigerator back at the office.

However, he let’s it sit in favor of a coffee and a blueberry muffin; he orders a cinnamon dolce latte and a chocolate croissant for Rey because she has a disgusting sweet tooth and she never misses a Friday afternoon.

The barista loans him the black sharpie when he asks and with a careful hand, Ben writes out his phone number on her cup’s sleeve. And then he waits.

Ben hears her before he sees her and he’s _pained_ by how young she appears, the reminder of how youthful she is. He’s never seen her so carefree, grinning with the good-looking boy at her side, their heads bowed together conspiratorially. They ideally punctuate the frilly heart cutouts that decorate the establishment.

It’s a tethering he can’t properly put words to, how she finds him in the crowd. It’s borrowed from saccharine films, the spill of her hair from the tug of her knitcap and the way her eyes glint above the slow stretch of her lips into something soft, warm, and fragile. She’s gorgeous and all Ben can think is that he’s not meant for it; he’ll ruin that smile, given the opportunity.

He can’t do this. He’d be useless for her. He _can’t do this, can’t do this, can’t do this_ —the cacophony rings in his head.

The young pair exchange words by the door and the guy makes a gesture that Ben can’t fully see but that gets Rey to roll her eyes, the skin of her cheekbones flushed.

She comes over to him and he stands quickly.

“What are you doing? Are you leaving?” She appraises him with an arched brow, yanking off her gloves and shoving them in her pocket.

“I have something at the office I forgot about.” Ben starts to collect the items on the table, scooping up the baked goods with one hand, reaching for a cup with the other but she stops him, her fingers clasping over his to coax him still.

She leans into his space. Her gaze flits over his face, searching. “You have to go right now?”

He nods. “Yeah, yeah, I do.”

Rey spares a glance over her shoulder and back at him her expression is flat and unimpressed. “Finn? He’s not my boyfriend if that’s what you’re thinking and acting like a fool over.”

“Why would I care enough to think that?” he asks, mean-spirited and as cruel as he can manage, because he’s a bastard and it’s best she understand that now. He knows that Finn isn’t her boyfriend—because Rey’s told him all about her friends, talks so vividly about them that he can recognize them without having met them—but someone like that guy could be and should be.

“Right. If you don’t, then you should go,” she replies tightly, removing her hand but keeping her ground, giving him no choice but to walk past her.

 

*

 

Rey lets him go until he’s in the parking lot keying his car door open with a shaking hand.

“Do you think that you’re the only one who’s lonely and afraid of putting their shit on someone else?”

He turns around to look at her. She’s got his number in her grip and it’s a revelation, the fiery anger and determination in her frame and Ben is at the edge of giving up.

“Rey, listen, this—this is a bad idea, alright?” He feels so damn exposed when it comes to her and he wonders if the rawness will ever give way, the inability to hide. He shakes his head, tries not to sound as fucking wounded as he is. “I’m not the kind of guy you’re looking for.”

Rey surges against him, presses achingly close and kisses him, hushing the brain noise that hadn’t stopped. Her lips are dry as they move with his, leaving behind a gasp when she eases away. Rey has her fingers in his hair and then urgent on his jaw and she’s making him stare at her, overriding his vision. He holds on to the opening of her peacoat, strength loss and in desperate need of an anchor. He finds the curve of her waist, follows where it dips to her hip.

“I wasn’t looking for anyone actually,” she tells him, “but I’m not going to be a coward when something good finds me. Do you understand that?”

“I don’t deserve you,” he barely gets out, frightened for her, for them both.

She noses along his skin and says quietly, “I think that if we all used who-deserves-who as a type of currency the world would be pretty bankrupt, don’t you?” She kisses him again, catching his fingers with hers, twining them in a way that feels irrevocable. She draws her mouth away mere inches, teases him with a small smile. “I mean, the exchange rate alone. Personally, I’d be in debt up to my ears with all the good I’ve borrowed.” Squeezing his hand, “you matter to me. I wasn’t expecting that.”

“Neither was I,” he says. He couldn’t have ever planned for her and any warning label would have undersold her completely in every regard.

“You matter to me,” she repeats after they’ve both settled considerably and social propriety has re-inserted itself. “So will you come back inside and meet my friend? I told him you have very fluid moods, yes, but you’re not making a very good first impression.”

He rolls his eyes and locks his car door. “I’ve never made a good first impression in my life.”

“That’s not true,” she replies.

Ben wants to say that she can’t be serious but Rey doesn’t say what she doesn’t mean so he doesn’t bother arguing. The wind is kicking his ass and he just spent about fifteen bucks that he’s not going to get back so he might as well get his money’s worth sitting in the Starbucks for a couple of hours.

“After you then,” he says.

 

*


End file.
